Hi all,
Due to severe weather today and very low attendance, I’m postponing our session to next week, same time (10:15-13:15).
I know it’s frustrating when plans change, but maybe this gives us an unexpected gift: more time to sit with what we’ve been reading.
Something to watch/listen before next week:
I came across this interview with N. Katherine Hayles about her book Bacteria to AI that connects directly to what we’ve been working through with Schlanger:
It’s long (nearly 2 hours), but you don’t need to watch all of it. Here’s what I’d suggest:
Watch/listen to the first 30-40 minutes (up to where she starts discussing her specific experiments with GPT-3).
Pay attention especially when she talks about:
- Why “decentering the human” matters (around 10-15 minutes in)
- The concept of “umwelt” – how different entities construct their worlds differently (she gets into this around 25-30 minutes)
- Non-conscious cognition vs. unconscious (early in the conversation)
Why this connects to what we’re doing:
Hayles is making an argument that sounds familiar if you’ve been reading Schlanger: that we need frameworks to understand intelligence that don’t assume it looks like human brains, human consciousness, human decision-making.
Her “integrated cognitive framework” (ICF) is trying to do what Schlanger does with plants – recognize cognitive capacities that work completely differently from ours. She’s just extending it from bacteria to AI.
But here’s where it gets interesting for us: When she talks about how liberal humanism assumes bounded, autonomous individuals, and how this is fundamentally wrong because we’re all “holobionts” (collectivities of organisms) – doesn’t this sound like the covered tree problem we’ve been discussing? The fiction of autonomy when everything survives through networks?
And when she discusses “umwelt” – how different species construct completely different worlds through their sensory and cognitive apparatus – isn’t that another version of asking: what does a plant’s world look like? What signals can it detect that we can’t?
Small task (optional, but useful):
As you watch/listen, notice one moment where Hayles’ argument about non-human cognition, interdependence, or distributed intelligence makes you think differently about something in your Middle East studies work.
Not “could be applied to” – but genuinely: what specific situation, archive, text, community, historical moment came to mind?
Bring that noticing to next week. We’ll start there.
One more thing:
Around 40-45 minutes in, Hayles talks about the “umwelt of LLMs” – how large language models construct their worlds. If you’re interested in the AI stuff we’ve been gesturing toward, that section is worth your time. But it’s not required for our session.
Stay warm, stay safe. See you next week.
Best,
V
P.S. If the weather or other circumstances keep you from attending next week, just let me know. We’ll figure it out.
Nur der Text ist unter der Lizenz Creative Commons Namensnennung 4.0 International nutzbar. Alle anderen Elemente (Abbildungen, importierte Anhänge) sind „Alle Rechte vorbehalten“, sofern nicht anders angegeben.
OpenEdition schlägt Ihnen vor, diesen Beitrag wie folgt zu zitieren:
Victoria Mummelthei (27. Januar 2026). Session Postponed to Next Week + Something to Watch. Keine Disziplin – No Discipline. Abgerufen am 9. März 2026 von https://doi.org/10.58079/15kn1

